7 Wonders is an awesome board game that features a drafting mechanic and a race to build the most dominant civilization. The victory points can come from structures, military, science, or even building out your Wonder! But, there’s a hidden lesson in this game about finance. What can 7 Wonders teach us about money?
TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up, Internet? My name’s Ian Bloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance. I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd! In today’s episode, we are going to be talking about a board game, 7 Wonders. 7 Wonders is an interesting board game to bring up because, well, like all other board games, it has a hidden lesson in it. In this game, you are building your ideal civilization and starting to accrue victory points, which are essentially influence on the world. Victory points in 7 Wonders come from spending resources and building structures or objectives that will convey certain resources or benefits to your civilization. There are cards that are used to accomplish this. It is a drafting game where you get to pick a card out of each pack and pass it onto your neighbor. The different types of cards, starting with brown, are resource cards and then move on to things like science, merchants and eventually civilian structures that are incredibly beneficial to your society.
Now, the interesting thing about 7 Wonders is that while it has an economic system, there are also ways to work around it and almost never use gold. Gold allows you to buy resources from your neighbors and to accomplish certain things within your civilization like purchasing certain cards, but it does not prove to be mandatory throughout the game. And this is a lesson that I think 7 Wonders can teach us very well. You see, planning, financial planning or otherwise, is not about the money and neither is life. Money is a tool that you may need in order to accomplish the things that you want in life, but ultimately you get to decide your path. So the amount of money that somebody needs is entirely individual to them. Finances are not the purpose, but they are one of the best tools to get you closer to your purpose.
Ultimately, the other thing that 7 Wonders teaches us is that you need an infrastructure set around yourself to win the game. The people who win a game of 7 Wonders are people who have committed to a strategy and built out all of the architecture for that strategy, whether that be science or civilian structures or merchants or just building out your wonder, and it’s similar in life. If you’re going to accomplish something of meaning, you have to set up an infrastructure around yourself, whether that is building a business like I’ve done, or just simply having the social networks and support systems set up around yourself to accomplish these things.
Finally, financial infrastructure is a good thing to have in place in order to ensure that the resource of gold in 7 Wonders or money in real life is able to be provided to fit your goals. So there’s my summary. In essence, 7 Wonders teaches us that life is not about money, it’s about the things that money can help you do, and that in order to accomplish longterm goals, you do need to set up some sort of infrastructure around yourself to make those possible. If you enjoyed this video, like, comment, subscribe, those sorts of things. And if you find that this video leaves you wanting to learn more about my services or my firm, please head over to OpenWorldFP.com. Thanks so much for watching. Have a nice day.
